Heathrow Airport says it won’t limit how many people can fly from its terminals around Christmas period.
The UK’s biggest airport said it was getting ready for the holiday travel season that would be the busiest in three years.
Heathrow Airport also said that before the summer break, staffing would be back to how it was before the COVID outbreak.
It also said that it helped Border Force and other groups plan what to do if there was a strike.
When the Covid travel ban was lifted earlier this year, it was hard for some airlines to find enough people to work because people wanted to travel again.
In July, Heathrow set a limit of 100,000 passengers per day to fix the problems that customers were having.
To make sure they were following the rules, some airlines had to cancel flights. It pushed the deadline was pushed back to October 29, but that date has now passed.
But the airport had said before that it was working with airlines to “match supply and demand.”
Airlines UK said that any system needs to make sense. But, on the other hand, Virgin Atlantic said it was ready to offer a full winter schedule. And asked the airport not to limit how many people could use it during Christmas because “that would mess up customers’ plans.”
Heathrow has a good plan
Heathrow now says it has a “good plan” that doesn’t need a limit on the number of flights.
It is still talking about the details with each airline. Still, people know that some flights could be moved to less busy times and others could be combined.
The airline with the most flights at Heathrow, British Airways, has already cut its winter schedule to what it thinks it can handle.
This year, Heathrow said it had more passengers than any other European airport.
84% of the people who used the airport in 2019 went there in October.
Last month, the airport businesses will hire and train as many as 25,000 people.
In the past year, companies hired about 16,000 people, according to its most recent report. If the trend continues, jobs will return to where they were before the pandemic before the peak of next summer.
Soon, the UK’s aviation regulator will decide how much airlines can charge per passenger at Heathrow. Starting in January, for the cost of running terminals, runways, baggage systems, and security. Something that has become a massive problem for airlines.
Workers at Heathrow Airport will go on strike before the world cup
At the end of this month, thousands of people who work at Heathrow airport will go on strike for three days. So, football fans who want to fly to Qatar for the World Cup might have to make different plans.
The Unite union said that 700 workers at the busiest European airport would go on strike. Because of pay demands, from early in the morning on November 18 until early in the morning on November 21.
If fans fly to the World Cup, they might miss England’s first game, which is against Iran on November 21. In addition, terminals 2, 3, and 4 at Heathrow Airport are likely to be late because of the strike. Qatar Airways has planned to fly out of Terminal 4 ten times a week during the tournament.
After a crazy summer with canceled flights, long delays, a lot of lost luggage, and a limit on the number of people who could use Heathrow each day, the strike could cause more problems.
It also caused more problems for the company’s CEO, John Holland-Kaye. So airlines were very angry when Heathrow decided to limit the number of passengers to 100,000 per day from mid-July to the end of October.
Some other airlines affected by the strike are Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, and Emirates.
The strike will also affect people returning to the US for Thanksgiving.
